Occupy Wall Streeters claimed that they were populists. Their ideological opposites, the Tea
Partiers, said they were, too.

Both became polarizing. And so far populism, whether on the right or left, does not seem to have
made inroads with the traditional Republican and Democrat establishments.

Gasoline has gone up about $2 a gallon since Barack Obama took office. Given average yearly
rates of national consumption, that increase alone translates into an extra $1 trillion that
American drivers have collectively paid in higher fuel costs over the past 54 months.

Such a crushing burden on the cash-strapped commuter class rarely is cited in the liberal
fixation on cap-and-trade, wind and solar subsidies and the supposed dangers of fracking.

When the president scaled back the number of new gas and oil leases on federal lands over time,
or warned that “under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily
skyrocket,” he was appealing to his boutique base — not to those who can scarcely meet their
heating and cooling bills.

Should there not be an opening for a conservative populist response?

Unfortunately, pro-drilling conservatives sound more like spokesmen for oil companies than
grassroots champions for strapped motorists.

Total student debt is approaching $1 trillion. That is an unsustainable burden for recent
graduates under 25 facing an adjusted youth unemployment rate of over 20 percent.

Yet the well-off are more interested in ensuring that their children get into tony, name-brand
colleges than in fretting about how to pay for it.

On the other end, need- and ethnic-based scholarships and waivers have made college more
affordable for the poor than it is for the middle classes. The parents of the latter make enough to
be disqualified from most government help, but not enough to afford soaring tuition.

Banks find student loans backed by government guarantees profitable. Top-heavy universities
assume that there will always be more income from the subsidized poor and the rich. Again,
middle-class students are caught up a creek without the paddles of wealthy parents or a generous
government.

There is also a populist argument to be made against the farm bill. There are more than 48
million Americans on food stamps, an increase of about 12 million since the beginning of the Obama
presidency.

At a time of record-high crop prices, the U.S. government still helps well-off farmers with some
$20 billion in annual crop payouts and indirect subsidies.

The left mythicizes food-stamp recipients almost as if they all must be the Cratchits of
Dickensian England.

The right romanticizes corporate agriculture as if the growers all were hardscrabble family
farmers in need of a little boost to get through another tough harvest.

Those in between, who pay federal income taxes and are not on food stamps, lack the empathy of
the poor and the clout of the rich. Can’t a politician say that?

Given the slow-growth, high-unemployment economy, and the policies of the Federal Reserve,
interest on simple passbook accounts has all but vanished.

The poor are not so affected. They are more often borrowers than lenders, and they are sometime
beneficiaries of federally subsidized debt relief.

The rich have the capital and connections to find more-profitable investments in real estate or
the stock market that make them immune from pedestrian, underperforming savings accounts.

This administration’s loose money policy has been good for the indebted and even better for the
stock-invested rich. But it is absolutely lousy for the middle class and for strapped retirees with
a few dollars in conservative passbook accounts.

The aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown followed the same script. The crisis arose from a
strange connivance between loans to the unqualified and huge profits for Wall Street. Its remedy
was to have the lowly taxpayer pick up the walk-away debt of the former while offering bailouts for
the latter.

Polls show the president’s approval numbers are tanking. Congress hardly can become any more
unpopular. Maybe one reason is that neither seems to care much about those who are not rich and not
poor.

America has plenty of community organizers and agitators, and even more smooth corporate
lobbyists, but populist politicians disappeared long ago.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at Stanford University's Hoover
Institution.